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Melvin Konnor's Unsettled
In his text, entitled Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews, the professor of Jewish studies, biology, and human anthropology of Emory University Melvin Konnor ties the unsettlement or displacement and persecution of the Jewish people to their essential identity and integrity as a people. He asks the questions -- how did the Jews as a people survive such unsettlement and displacement so well, and keep the Jewish religion and even their ethnicity relatively intact, or at least in recognizable enough form that the Jewish religion still survives today? How did the Jewish people retain their uniqueness as a people in so many distinctive foreign territories? "Other people have suffered greatly; others have survived. But the Jews seem to garner a kind of attention focused on no other people ... Why? That is the mystery at the heart of this book, and it took me, and will take us, through the grand sweep of Jewish cultures in time and space," writes Konner...
He distills his text into a series of cycles, of persecutions and creative religious and cultural responses to such persecution. For example, the author traces the rise of ecstatic, popular forms of worship of the Eastern European Hasidism to the Polish invasion of the Ukrainian Jewish communities and the ensuing pogroms. Judaism as a culture and a faith was always in a resilient dialogue with an often-hostile gentile world, but this persecution also spawned a unity within the Jewish communities of a variety of nations that prevented Judaism from dying out.
Unsettled begins with the origins of the ancient Israelites Egypt, the first place of persecution where Jews lived in hostile territory. It then takes on the major areas of the Jewish Diaspora such…
Works Cited
Konnor, Melvin. Unsettled: An Anthropology of the Jews. New York:
Viking Books, 2003.
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